Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8658412" data-attributes="member: 82106">Exactly, but there seems to be a lack of understanding as to exactly HOW DIFFERENT the state of thought on RPGs is today than it was in 1974 (or '84, '94, etc.). I don't make a claim about my experience to be some sort of jerk who claims to know more than all the other nerds. What I'm saying is, having been there in 1974 and all those years in between, and ACTUALLY PARTICIPATED in those discussions, and actively played many of the games involved and tinkered with them, and seen what we ACTUALLY DID LEARN from them, the notion that we're just repeating ourselves endlessly is patently absurd. I'm sure Torner et al. THINK they have discovered some great truth there, but personally I think they have cherry-picked, interpreted things in a way that serves their purpose, etc. This is a problem with all research of this kind in the 'social sciences' or general academia, there's really no way to do what is now common in hard science, where BEFORE YOU COLLECT DATA you form a hypothesis and you state exactly how you will interpret the data and which outcomes will produce which conclusions. Time and time again experience has proven that all other approaches are essentially just testing biases.So, I would not dismiss Evan Torner entirely out of hand. I would just say that it doesn't seem to be part of his agenda to actually see the huge gains in terms of effectiveness of analytical methods, which has completely revolutionized the views of game designers to the point where the vast majority of original RPG output today is both highly original and was pervasively influenced by those methods and the thinking behind them. If it was just "more of the same", then why the revolution in RPG design? I mean, Blades in the Dark would literally have been impossible to conceive of as an RPG in 1990. Not the most talented RPG designers and forward thinking members of the community yet grasped the conceptual framework that was necessary to have in mind in order to design that game. That's not repeating yourself!</blockquote>

Verification